Book review: Between the Assassinations

Aravind Adiga's second work of fiction explores similar territory to his Booker-winning The White Tiger, said Joan Smith in the Times: India's "startling inequalities of wealth, the caste system, the despair of the poor".

It is a group of linked stories about a fictional coastal city in south India, set between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and that of her son Rajiv in 1991. The book has a Dickensian range - Adiga conjures up bank managers and rickshaw pullers, factory owners and tea boys "with a few telling details" - and a Dickensian "outrage", too, on behalf of the have-nots. Its weakness is that the various stories "barely connect".

"Adiga is at his best when describing the everyday realities of village people who escape to a big city, and end up living on the streets and doing the most menial jobs," said Peter Parker in the Sunday Times. Even the weaker stories are "lively and keenly observed".

The book is both revealing and very enjoyable, said Ed King in the Sunday Telegraph. "This is fiction at its most ambitious and incisive, and every bit as impressive as Adiga's debut."

Between the Assassinations, by Aravind Adiga, 320pp (Atlantic Books, £14.99) The Week Bookshop £13.49 (incl p&p) ·